Accessory after the fact to murder
DENVER, Colorado––Former Safari Club International president Larry Rudolph’s longtime mistress Lori Milliron, 65, was on June 23, 2023 sent to prison for 17 years and fined $250,000 as an accessory after the fact to the murder of Rudolph’s wife, obstruction of a grand jury, and two counts of perjury before a grand jury.
Tried together with Larry Rudolph, Milliron escaped conviction on two other counts of perjury.
Larry Rudolph, 68, and Milliron were convicted by jury on August 1, 2022. Larry Rudolph, found guilty of killing his wife Bianca Rudolph, 56 at her death, at the end of a trophy hunting expedition to Zambia, has yet to be sentenced for the crime.
(See Former Safari Club International president convicted of killing his wife.)
Larry Rudolph sentencing postponed
Larry Rudolph was to have been sentenced for murder and defrauding multiple insurance companies of a combined total of $4.8 million earlier in the week in which Milliron was sentenced, but reportedly won a last-minute postponement.
Federal judge William J. Martinez denied Milliron’s motion for non-guideline sentencing, which might have been more lenient, and instead granted a U.S. Department of Justice motion for a longer-than-usual sentence.
“In their motion,” mentioned CNN correspondent Rebekah Riess, “federal prosecutors had argued that ‘Even now, Milliron has expressed no remorse.’”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Milliron helped Larry Rudolph to obtain lethal drug
Argued the prosecution, “Lori Milliron encouraged Lawrence Rudolph to kill his wife for her. She told him to divorce Bianca Rudolph. When he said he couldn’t afford to do that, Milliron responded by helping Rudolph procure propofol – a lethal anesthetic drug that could be used as a poison – before he took the trip where he did what she had wanted: get rid of Bianca.”
“Judge William J. Martínez argued that the long sentence was deserved,” reported Jesse Bedayn of Associated Press, “because evidence pointed to Milliron ‘encouraging’ the crime. Martínez added that Milliron seemed ‘unrepentant’ in part because he judged her emotionally unmoved when she was shown graphic images and listened to wrenching testimony during the trial.
Attorney John Dill, representing Milliron, told CNN that her defense plans to appeal both the sentence and the jury’s verdict
(Beth Clifton collage)
Larry Rudolph claimed wife shot herself
Rudolph shot his wife Bianca Finizio Rudolph, also a trophy hunter, at close range in their rented cabin at a Zambian hunting resort on October 11, 2016, but claimed she shot herself by dropping her rifle, after unsuccessfully hunting a leopard.
The prosecution demonstrated that the shot that killed Bianca Rudolph had to have been fired from two to three and a half feet farther away than Larry Rudolph said it was.
“Prosecutors alleged,” Associated Press summarized, “that Rudolph decided to kill his wife to regain control over his life after Bianca Rudolph asked for more say in the couple’s finances and demanded that Milliron,” employed by Rudolph’s dental firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, “be fired.”
Larry Rudolph at the time of the killing “was worth at least $5 million,” according to Matt Sullivan of Rolling Stone.
Milliron joined trophy hunting expeditions
Rudolph married the former Bianca Finizio in 1982. He hired Lori Milliron as a part-time dental hygienist in 2002.
“They soon traveled the world,” Sullivan wrote. “From 2003 to 2008, Larry flew together with Lori some 60 days each year, from Africa to Paris to New Zealand.
“In July 2009, Larry was elected president of Safari Club International, an organization he and his wife had helped to lead locally for more than two decades,” Sullivan said.
But after many indiscretions, Sullivan recounted, “Larry was blindsided by a public inquiry into his women, his travel, and his expenses” at a May 2011 Safari Club executive meeting.
“His awards were to be taken away, his name erased from the record books. Larry resigned that August,” Sullivan continued, but “took Safari Club to court for defamation and breach of contract.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“I killed my wife for you!”
“Larry managed to retain his beloved Weatherby Award,” the highest Safari Club honor for killing huge numbers of animals in multiple places, Sullivan added. “Bianca defended him.”
The investigation leading to the convictions of both Larry Rudolph and Lori Milliron began, Sullivan narrated, after Larry Rudolph “called the U.S. embassy in Lusaka, according to a summary from the authorities, and asked how to cremate his wife.”
The diplomat who took Larry Rudolph’s call, former U.S. Marine Otto Westhassel, “began to feel uncomfortable that police work and postmortems were moving so quickly,” Sullivan wrote, “so two days later he traveled to a funeral home and photographed the cadaver himself.”
The Westhassel photographs formed the basis for the successful conviction.
The clinching evidence, however, may have been testimony from bartender Brian Lovelace that in 2020 he overheard an argument in which he heard Larry Rudolph scream at Lori Milliron, “I killed my fucking wife for you.”
Lovelace immediately told co-workers.
Defense attorney David Marcus contended that Larry Rudolph actually said, “They’re saying I fucking killed my wife for you.”
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The wheels of what passes for “justice” grind slow. And one way or another, the chickens do come home to roost.
Sharing with gratitude.
How was propofol involved in the murder? Propofol is considered a very safe drug if used properly.
It killed Michael Jackson. It has to be given intravenously.
In order to be used to kill, someone has to get the victim to allow IV administration.
From the available information, it appears that administering propofol was a murder plan that was not executed. Shooting Bianca Rudolph appears to have been Plan B.